"A Death in Malta
By Paul Caruana Galizia
Riverhead, 304 pages, $29
Imagine the corrupt Tammany Hall of old reborn in a sovereign state in postwar Europe -- a tiny archipelago, no more, in the southern Mediterranean. After independence from Britain in 1964, its anti-Western leaders courted Muammar Gaddafi as ally and benefactor. The national passport used to be colored green in homage (it was said) to the Libyan panjandrum, and there was a time when you couldn't study at a local university without sponsorship from the dominant (leftist) political party. Since its admission to the European Union in 2004, the country has been the smallest by area (121 square miles) and population (542,000) in the bloc. It sells passports-of-convenience to foreigners of high net worth -- often from post-Soviet republics.
Meet murky little Malta, democratic Europe's notable outlier -- not just geographically and linguistically (having the only Semitic official language in the EU) but morally and ethically. Its politicians are in a venal class of their own, more unaccountable than any others in the eurozone. And its rule of law, rickety at best, is shockingly derelict for an EU country. This isn't just the judgment of fastidious outsiders, predisposed to look askance at Malta. It's how Paul Caruana Galizia, a young Maltese journalist, portrays his native land in "A Death in Malta." And he does so for reasons that are both personal -- specifically, the 2017 murder of his mother by hitmen with links to the country's ruling Labour Party -- and fiercely principled.
More than six years after the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an anti-corruption crusader who was the country's best-known journalist, the man accused of having conceived and paid for the car bombing that killed her is fighting the charges in court. He is one of Malta's richest businessmen, and he is politically well-connected. Echoing a belief widely held in Malta, Mr. Caruana Galizia suggests that the businessman arranged the hit to prevent his victim from revealing -- on her fearless blog, which amounted to the Maltese "corruption encyclopedia" -- details of a business deal in which he was involved. Mr. Caruana Galizia quotes his own father -- Daphne's husband -- saying that hers was a "political killing": "She was murdered," he said, "for what she had written or what she was about to write."
"A Death in Malta" is a chronicle of the sort of silencing-by-murder. As Mr. Caruana Galizia asks: "Hadn't Europe consigned car bombs to history?" The book is also a son's distraught but beautiful tribute to his journalist-mother, known throughout Malta simply as "Daphne," the name given to her on the prompting of a doctor on the day of her birth in 1964. He'd seen the newborn's mother reading "Rebecca" -- the novel by Daphne du Maurier -- in her hospital bed and had asked: "So then, are you going to call her Daphne so that she'll be a writer?"
Daphne did, indeed, become a writer, of a kind that a startled Malta hadn't seen before. People read her, she once said, to "feel normal in a sea of insanity." Her last published words were: "There are crooks everywhere you look," a line that came to be emblazoned on the T-shirts of protesters after her death.
For most of its modern existence, Malta has been a squalid place of bribes and kickbacks, with a civil society too cowed to protest.
Mr. Caruana Galizia writes that "in a small country, you are never far from your enemies." Daphne knew, he tells us, that "the culture of silence was the product of the fear of reprisal." The expression of contrarian opinions and public demands for transparency -- both of which were Daphne's stock-in-trade -- could result in ostracism or worse. On one occasion, someone slit the throat of Daphne's border collie. On another, her house was set on fire by arsonists enraged by her writing. These assaults shook her, Mr. Caruana Galizia says. But they did not deter her from raking tirelessly through government corruption. In her son's words, she believed that the triumph of the unscrupulous was "inevitable, unless you actively campaigned against it."
Although Mr. Caruana Galizia tells Daphne's story with unabashed filial devotion, he's never mawkish, managing his deep-seated anguish with an admirable restraint and elegance. Alongside his account of her life, we are given, also, a history of the islands, in which he describes the culture and patterns of corruption, violence and impunity that predate independent Malta and that found their most unrestrained expression in the comportment of the country's postcolonial politicians, judges, cops and businessmen.
For three decades, until she was blown to smithereens one October afternoon in 2017, Daphne was (in her own words) a beacon for "decent people who feel frightened and threatened at the rise, growth and spread of amorality." When Malta joined the EU two decades ago, she had hoped that membership in a union of civilized democracies would usher in an era of civic modernity.
Instead Malta became the back door through which illicit money washed through Europe: "Becoming European," writes Mr. Caruana Galizia, "was only about becoming richer faster."
And so Daphne went from writing about insular venality to exposing corruption on a grander scale, which reached its apogee with the leak of the so-called Panama Papers in 2016, in which senior Maltese politicians were found to have set up shadow companies that enriched them.
Yet membership in the EU had its downside for Malta's grubby political class, which had to bow -- after much resistance -- to demands from European legal bodies that Daphne's murder be investigated with due diligence. The government was forced to hold a public inquiry into her death, which Mr. Caruana Galizia describes as "Malta's first truth and justice commission." This was announced in September 2019. Four years later, her family still awaits both truth and justice. But as her son's exquisite book makes clear, they will not rest until Daphne's story gets the ending of which she herself would have approved.
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Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]
1. Lost in a Sea Of Corruption. Varadarajan, Tunku. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 Dec 2023: A.17.
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